


but it was the turning point

by librarby



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blind Character, F/F, Rated T for language, Therapy, melanie: queen of recovery queen of self care, no beta we die like tim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25413100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/librarby/pseuds/librarby
Summary: Melanie swallows and props the whiteboard up on her knee to write.Georgie. My girlfShe erases.Georgie. My best frienShe stares blankly for another few seconds.Georgie. My girlfriend.[title from spaceman by the killers]
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Melanie King & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 22
Kudos: 76





	but it was the turning point

**Author's Note:**

> just want everyone to know that this was titled in my google docs as 'melanie is in hellanie'  
> also note that there are two offhand references to being institutionalized but nothing mentioned beyond that :-)

Melanie spends the first of her therapy sessions in near absolute silence. 

This is partially because she has no idea how to phrase 'I was under the influence of a fear power as old as humanity itself and now I’m trapped in a place under the power of another one' without getting institutionalized. And partially because she’s convinced if she starts speaking, she’ll miss the telltale whirring that’s bound to pop up somewhere in the office. The woman she’s been paired with tries to record the session and she nearly jumps out of her skin, her leg aching just enough to be noticeable. 

She’s crying when she meets back up with Georgie in the waiting room, but they schedule again for two weeks out. 

On her second visit, her therapist (Dr. “Call me Holly, dear” James) is ready with a whiteboard. It’s nice, being able to have time to slow down and formulate her thoughts before they have to be shown to someone else. Sometimes she even draws pictures, like the tiny stick figure she uses to represent herself.

“Who is that?” Holly asks, pointing to the stick figure that has a heart instead of a circle for a head.

She’s answering some question that she’s already forgotten, something mundane about how her day was. The whiteboard depicts two people, herself and the heart person, sitting on a crudely drawn bench. The legs are a little long and the proportion is terrible, but hey, she was a YouTuber, not an artist. 

Melanie swallows and props the whiteboard up on her knee to write. 

_Georgie. My girlf_

She erases.

_Georgie. My best frien_

She stares blankly for another few seconds. Holly smiles at her patiently.

_Georgie. My girlfriend._

Holly nods and writes something carefully on that pad of paper she always has. It makes something drop in the pit of Melanie’s stomach. She _knows_ how patient confidentiality works, but it doesn’t stress her out any less that there could be a record somewhere of the things she discloses in this room.

Still, better than a fucking tape recorder.

“Why don’t you tell me about Georgie?” Holly prompts.

Melanie takes a long moment erasing the whiteboard. Her eyes scan Holly’s wrists for cobwebs. The corners of the room are clear, too, which is somewhat reassuring. 

_I live with her. Sort of. My flat gets lonely._

“I see. How long have you lived together?”

_IDK. Since this thing at work happened. (Don’t want to talk abt it rn)_

Holly opens her mouth to ask another question but stops when she sees Melanie’s pen moving again.

_She’s the one that suggested therapy._

“That’s very supportive of her, don’t you think?” Holly’s scribbling up a storm now, so Melanie quickly erases.

_New topic._

Georgie is waiting in the waiting room as before, that same smile on her face. She lights up when she sees Melanie, as though they hadn’t been together an hour ago. “No tears today? I’ll assume that’s an improvement?” She asks, once they're in Georgie's beat up SUV. 

Melanie snorts, putting her feet up on the dashboard even though she knows Georgie hates it. “Something like that.” It’s a little odd responding to questions vocally. She finds herself missing the little black pen. She smiles a little, imagining herself bringing it to the Institute and how annoyed the Eye would be that it couldn’t hear her.

(Could the Eye get annoyed? Did eldritch fear abominations feel irritation? Certainly it’d annoy Elias, which is actually enough for her to seriously consider it for a moment.) 

Georgie hums in response and turns up the radio. The man singing sounds bright and happy. Georgie sings along under her breath as she pulls out of the parking lot. Melanie thinks about changing the station, but doesn’t. 

The things she can do now are more surprising than the things she cannot. She doesn’t have the same dexterity as before, the same instinct in her gut to scan a room for potential weapons (she does that one anyway, though, as it’s become a routine). 

Melanie laughs now. She could laugh before, sure, but she didn’t... _laugh_. The first time Georgie calls Elias “Bitchard”, she practically folds in half in the middle of the kitchen, gasping for air over something that, in honesty, she shouldn’t find that funny. But she does because it’s Georgie and it’s the first time she’s really laughed in months. She laughs so hard she cries. 

She can do that too. Cry, that is. The only time she cried as part of the Slaughter was when Elias–

It’s odd releasing emotion in a way that isn’t bitter sharpness. In it’s own twisted way, her anger was comforting, a red hot thing that she kept trapped inside her chest, ripping open her ribcage whenever she felt cornered or otherwise emotional. Now, something cold and wet sits there. She wants to cough it out, but it clings to the walls, refusing to leave. 

She really can’t tell if she hates it or not.

The Archives are dark when she walks in to work (see: prison) for the day. For a split second she considers leaving them that way, but rationality wins out and she hits the lightswitch. 

There’s a strip of light underneath Jon’s office door and Melanie nearly rolls her eyes when she sees it. She starts to walk past it to her desk, ready to make paper airplanes out of statements or watch Netflix on her phone, but stops when she’s next to the door. Inside, she can hear the cadence of Jon’s voice, taking on a strange higher quality than it’s normal tone. 

Brushing away a cobweb with the toe of her boot, she sits down against the wall next to his door and pulls out her phone. There’s an email for her (“Google Alert: war ghosts - new results”) and a text from Georgie (“I’m recording most of today but I’ll be free when you get out! Love you <3”). 

She sets her phone down. 

Jon’s voice is back in it’s normal dry register, saying something about the Spiral. His words are mostly muffled but Melanie doesn’t care to hear them anyway. She leans her head back against the wall. 

A few moments go by. The Archives are quiet enough that she can hear the humming of the shitty fluorescent lights overhead. She wonders in the back of her head where Basira or Daisy are, but isn’t sure if she really cares enough to know. 

The door opens. Melanie flinches, hand going to her hip where her knife is. Her fingers brush air and she remembers that it’s back in Georgie’s flat, in the lockbox in her closet. Where it has been for weeks. 

“Melanie?” How Jon is able to sound both tired and energized is beyond her, but she figures it’s got to be an eldritch fear thing. 

It's always an eldritch fear thing. 

“Hey.” She says, as though being on the floor is completely normal, moving her hand back so it’s propped up on her knee. 

“Why are–” He stops, letting out a long sigh before speaking again. “You’re outside my office.”

She may not be a knowledge monster like him and Elias, but she can still piece together the question he’s trying to ask without...Asking. She shrugs in response. Honestly, she’s not quite certain why she’s sitting here, but it’s still quite fun to hold things out of Jon’s reach. 

Just to prove to herself that she still can. 

Jon narrows his eyes for a second, but takes in another breath. “Okay.” He stares down at her, and it feels like it always does, like he’s a thousand eyes at once and she’s pinned underneath their gaze. “Melanie, I’m sorry.” 

“Would you stop apologizing?” In another time, her words would have been spiked, ripping through whatever was in their path, but for now they just sound tired. Sad and tired words from a sad and tired person. 

For all the things that Jon has done to her, he never seems to pity her, which is probably the one thing he’s gotten right in his life. He just studies her with that neutral look he always has, as though he’s trying to figure her out but can’t find the last piece. 

“You can come inside. If you want.” His words are stilted, an obvious plea from someone who’s gone too long without company. 

Melanie sighs. She knows he doesn’t actually want it to be her. Jon wants Martin, or at the very least Daisy, who she knows has taken up near permanent residence in the corner of Jon’s office like some sort of stick thin gargoyle. 

“Thanks, but I don’t.” She says. “Want to, that is.”

His face falls for a second but he recovers relatively quickly, blinking at her (it reminds her a little of the Admiral and she hates that it reminds her of the Admiral). “Oh. Okay.”

“I think you can understand why I wouldn’t want to be alone in a room with you.” She says. Again, her words don’t have the right edge to them but they nonetheless seem to hit Jon in the exact spot she was aiming for. 

They’re not anger fueled words, because she knows what those feel like. They rip themselves from her throat before she can consider what she’s saying, relishing in the way they slash and carve at her victim. These are piloted by that thing in her gut, the sadness that she finds only gets heavier inside this damned building. Her words are carefully chosen, slowly crafted in a way she knows will sink into Jon’s head for the rest of the day.

He stands silent, then nods and ducks back into his office. A few seconds later there’s a tape recorder click and the lull of a familiar voice.

Melanie frowns when she realizes that heaviness is still there. 

She sits there, listening to the buzz of the lights overhead until Basira comes down the Archive stairs and asks her what the hell she’s doing on the ground. 

It doesn’t take long for Melanie to reach her decision after Jon tells her how to leave. She stops by his office, awl in hand, requesting he call an ambulance. He smiles at her, and she’s oddly glad that it’s the last look she’ll ever see on his face. 

(Fear, ironically, does not suit Jonathan Sims.)

Her phone gets left at the Institute when the ambulance arrives, a picture of Georgie frozen on the screen. Jon is actually the one who calls from the hospital. Melanie almost wishes she hadn’t passed out just so she could hear the way Georgie undoubtedly screamed at him over the phone. 

Almost.

“Guess I can’t write on a whiteboard now, huh?” 

Holly is quiet for a moment. Melanie can hear a clock ticking somewhere in the office. Hm, she’d never noticed that. “I suppose you can’t.”

“It’s okay.” Melanie smiles, and feels every muscle in her face shifting to make that smile. “I think I’m ready to talk.” 

She can tell Georgie’s grinning when she makes her way to the waiting room. Getting used to the long white cane was a bit of a challenge, but she enjoys the freedom it gives her. While holding hands with her girlfriend is one of her life’s greatest pleasures, it’s also nice to go off on her own. 

“No tears.” Melanie tells her once they’ve made it to the car. 

“What?” She’s fiddling with the radio dial again. The song is sad, another one that Melanie doesn’t recognize but Georgie seems to, humming along to the words. 

“I didn’t cry this time.” After the words leave her mouth she realizes how ridiculous she sounds. “Give the woman a trophy, you know?”

The song on the radio changes, this time to a classic rock song that Melanie actually knows. She taps her foot to the beat. “Mel, I’m not kidding when I say that if I could give you a trophy, I would.” 

Melanie grins. “You should give me that podcasting award that you won in 2014.” 

“Only if you give me your YouTube play button.” 

“I think it’s still back at my old flat, but I would break into it for you.” Melanie makes a few karate motions in the air. 

Georgie laughs. “That reminds me. We should clean out your old place. You know, get you moved in.” 

It takes a few seconds for the cogs in Melanie’s brain to creak into place. “Are you asking me to move in with you?” She feels her voice crack on the last word but she doesn’t particularly care.

The car’s turn signal clicks on then off. “Yeah. I mean, if you’d like. You’ve practically been living with me for months. I just want to let my landlord know so he doesn’t fine me an outrageous amount of money.” 

“I think I’d like that. The King-Barker household.”

“Barker-King, thank you very much.” 

For all her teasing, ‘Georgie’s apartment’ is very much turning to ‘Georgie and Melanie’s apartment’. Melanie has taken up near permanent residence in the guest room, which was also turning from ‘guest room’ to ‘Melanie’s room’. She’d fought back at the hospital, somehow convincing them that sending her away would do more harm than good. She had never been so relieved to hear the Admiral meowing as the day she was released.

Speaking of the Admiral, he is sitting in her lap, rubbing his body along her chest. He’s learned to bump himself against her so that she knows he’s there. In fact, he’d caught on to her blindness a lot quicker than you’d have thought. He was a smart cat.

“You’re a smart cat.” She tells him. He mews at her.

“He _is_ a smart cat.” Georgie agrees. 

Melanie holds out her hand. 

“What?” 

“Give me your hand.” 

“You know you can use your words to ask me to hold your hand.” Georgie says, but her fingers are already intertwining with Melanie’s. 

She means to make some quip back, to keep the banter going, but instead what comes out is “I love you.” 

Georgie is quiet for one achingly long second until she squeezes her hand. “I love you too, Mel. So much.” 

Melanie smiles. 

That’s another thing she does now, smile. She can feel it spreading through her body before it actually reaches her face. It’s a warm, bubbly feeling that she can’t help but associate with Georgie. It’s a bit like Goldilocks, she thinks, not too hot and not too cold. It’s nice. She likes smiling. She never did before, always thought her teeth were too weird. 

Georgie likes her teeth. 

The Admiral meows. Melanie runs her other hand along his body until she finds his head.

“He says you’re gay.” Georgie announces. 

“Damn right.” She turns to where she knows her girlfriend is sitting, pursuing her lips and making an obnoxious smacking sound. “Kiss?” 

Georgie sighs dramatically. “I guess.” 

Kissing is another thing Melanie does now. 

The fear monsters will just have to pry that from her cold, dead hands. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments help me find my way out of the spiral's hallways!  
> find me on tumblr @ nonbinaryjonsims !


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